My guitar-journey started in 1990 after my mum had just passed away and my father insisted that "every intelligent person should know how to play an instrument" or "if you don't wanna go to swim training anymore, you have to chose another pastime that keeps you from the streets". At ten years old I only knew about two instruments, guitar (which my mum had played) and piano (which I knew nothing about other than it seemed rather complicated).
So I chose guitar and after my first courses was even a bit optimistic about it though all we did there was pure theory and finger placement. But it already seemed exciting enough to chose a classical guitar and take it home and just hold it in my hands. It was something new, but the excitement didn't last very long as very soon I began to develop an interest in American Sports. Odd enough for a boy in the middle of nowhere in the ex-German Democratic Republic. But at that time everything from *America* seemed to be sort of magical.
So there was a clashing interest of me wanting to go out right after school, to play Football (with "the egg", not Soccer), Basketball or Baseball with my friends -- and then the constraint to go to music school (once a week only) and even the thirty minutes of daily practice seemed way too much a waste of time. But I went through it for five long years, until - after one year of a break - in 1996 we had moved from the city to a small village, deep in rural Germany where I found myself in a completely new environment, no friends etc and that's where I started to really discover music.
So this was still a troubled period of finding myself, we all know the confusion of being a teenager, again there was no internet but Music TV still existed. We had three music channels at that time and features like Metalla, 2Rock etc brought enough new music to discover at that time, also considering that maybe I could buy only one CD every two months and that was it. I was a complete recluse, a loner who just lived for his guitar and some Inline skating up and down the one lonely street in our village.
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| The black sheep of the family ;) |
After having had a few rock and metal tapes already in my childhood - most noteworthy U.D.O. "Timebomb" and my first self-bought CD-album Sepultura "Roots" - it was Metallica's "Black Album" that really struck a nerve in me. Listening and playing along to that album became my daily meditation for about a year, though I really knew nothing at all, nothing about power chords, bending notes etc. When I heard Kirk Hammett play a solo I always wondered what kind of effect that was when he played one of these amazing solos (bending notes and his trademark WAH-sound).
At that time I still tried to play along on my classical guitar but soon wanted a real electric guitar - and my long journey there can be read about in gear talk. Also my father still played a significant role, besides allowing me to play loud for several hours each day, he also introduced me to a couple of Classic Rock bands like Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin and Rory Gallagher -- "you gotta play like this". So I basically spend every day waking up, going to school, coming home playing, playing, playing - only interrupted by a meal and then again hours of meticulous guitar practice.
Other noteworthy albums at that time had been The Offspring's "Smash" which indeed taught me to play power chords, Bad Religion's "All Ages", Biohazard "No Holds Barred" and compilations of early-Black Sabbath and Canned Heat and a few songs from Led Zeppelin that I'd copied onto tape from my fathers CD-collection. What a funny time if I think back of it now ...
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| The sampler that introduced me to Kyuss in 1996. |
Sometime around 1997 I also discovered Stonerrock. To be precise I had bought a Visions Magazine in December 1996 which included a CD and one track there was from the late Kyuss, but it took me some months to get hooked for some reason. At that time I was also trying hard to master the art of Skateboarding (which I never managed, other than a few basic tricks) and had owned a few Skate VHS which had been another sort of sanctuary at that time. Really everything from USA was magical, and these video tapes featured some of the coolest music I ever heard - Fu Manchu became another favorite.
All this time I still was a total recluse. I had a few buddies in school but none of them was interested in music that much. Only one was at least a bit more open-minded towards that stuff and became my best buddy even though I was very much introverted at that time. Unbelievably shy too. But anyway, I consumed all music that I could and in 1999 on an announcement in Rock Hard magazine I began playing in a Dark Metal-band called Thoughts Of A Mortal. The mix between Gothic Rock and Extreme Metal was kind of "fancy" at that time; although I never was into that genre before I soon discovered some interesting bands, like Amorphis who are still a big favorite from that era.
Very soon after my initiation to the band, TOAM had to replace the singer and found a new guy in Christian Oelke, who soon became my best buddy because finally I found someone who'd dig Led Zeppelin and the more Blues-oriented Classic Rock-stuff the same, or even more, as me. Even though he had no clue at that time what Stonerrock was ;) we really sort of "had found each other" and soon made up the plan of starting a side-project which then became Terraplane, first more Garage Blues Rock between the early Rolling Stones and the Stooges.
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| Thoughts Of A Mortal w/Fenriz the dog, the golden late Summer of 2000 ;) |
I think in early 2001 I decided to leave TOAM, even though I liked the feeling and energy of playing in a band like this, it seemed not the right place. I liked some of that 90s metal stuff but Stoner and 70s Classic Rock had always been what I really wanted to play. Meeting Christian Oelke had in a way become one of the most important corner points of my life. We spend a lot of time, talking, listening and playing music and maybe I even learned to open myself a bit more than before even though we completely lived in our own world. Still, the internet had no real significance apart from the questionable joy of downloading some crappy 96 kbit songs from stonerrock.com.
After a first year of trial and error with drummers we found a guy called Andreas Herbst who became the third important part of our new project. I often tended to glorify the following years 2003-05 because the three of us really spend a lot of time with each other, not just playing songs but in a way really forming a friendship that I never had again in a band or even with any other musician. It was just the Springtime of our lifes, we were so naive, full of aspiration, yet clueless about many other things. To be honest we still lacked the professionalism that you need when you really want to achieve sth with your music.
So we played a bunch of shows, released a lot of LO-FI demo kind of material and had our first little studio experiences though actually no one from outside of the band had an idea of how we wanted to sound and I wrote under geartalk about the difficulties of finding my own sound. Anyway, we shared the stage with some cool bands like House Of Aquarius, The Hidden Hand, Gas Giant, Dozer ... remember this was a time when Stoner- or Psychedelic Rock was still very Underground. I mean you'd always meet the same 50 people max in every city and even the scene festivals were still below 500 attendees.
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| Andreas Herbst, Christian Oelke and I, Summer 2004 by Rene Mente |
However changes had already been coming round the bend when Andreas in 2005 decided to move to the Baltic Sea and Mr. Oelke and I again had to look for a drummer. At this point we'd been fortunate to team up with Jens Vogel (ex-Lunalone; a pretty cool grunge band from Magdeburg), who was also able to help recording a neat demo and the following album "Into The Unknown" which became the first proper label release. I will never forget the phone calls with infamous Nasoni-label owner Hans Bier (truly, rest in peace); "let's make it a double LP and if you don't have sth for the D-side well just let's put a booger from Wernigerode there" (original quote).
But again the problems came as manifold, Jens also played in about three or four other bands at that time and was often exhausted. I remember him sleeping in front of a Stone Wedge-concert (quite cool and loud band from Leipzig) and despite being an awesome drummer at rehearsals, his stage appearances often were the opposite (sorry buddy). So personnel changes seemed inevitable and this time - not sure why - we even decided to change the band name to Green Monkey (on a side note: later a bar in Wernigerode took that name).
Around this period Oelke also stepped back from playing bass and just sang and we found a new drummer (I only remember we called him 'the turtle'.) and Florian Furtner (ex-Methadon) from here on took over duty on four-string until the very first SBE-line up. After a few rehearsals 'the turtle' kind of disappeared and the final drummer in Green Monkey was a polish guy called Edward Bernatek. Cool dude despite being roughly 25 years older than us, and then ... after the Nasoni deal came to a close and suddenly we enjoyed a first little "success", he also convinced us to change back names to Terraplane.
A final bunch of shows have been played in early 2007 until I decided to move to Berlin and the band dynamics somehow collapsed and led me towards laying fundaments to Samsara Blues Experiment, in its earliest formation with Florian Furtner on bass and Robin Niehoff (ex-Marogreen, nowadays in Muddy Orchid) on drums. In a way we took over the jam parts that Terraplane was kind of known for and took them to a new extreme, and also for the first time in my life I decided to take over vocals. After writing lyrics since the early days in Thoughts Of A Mortal and sometimes even instructing Oelke on how to use his voice, it seemed just the logical next step.
To be continued under Samsara ...
